


good enough for pinup

by Catznetsov



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Porn, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Demisexuality, Dom/sub Undertones, M/M, Neckz 'n' Throats, Nicklas Backstrom vs camera, Softcore Porn, pornstar Alex Ovechkin, vampire Nicklas Backstrom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-02-14 05:28:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13000827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catznetsov/pseuds/Catznetsov
Summary: Nicke, at twenty-one, had not been comfortable discussing the latest trends in vampire erotica.





	1. ten years earlier

**Author's Note:**

> This is Neckz 'n' Throatz's European affiliate, the softcore porn mag marketed to vampires. Descriptions of semi-nude, non-sexually explicit glamour modeling. I'm not qualified to say anything about modeling and sex work in Sweden, this is not that, this is just lustful vampire Nicke Backstrom. That's it, that's all we need to say

“Ja, I read the contract,” Nicke had said, turning his shitty university Canon over in his hands. The casing around the lens attachment had cracked and come loose again, or if they were being honest Nicke had cracked it climbing down from a tree Friday night, and now he was convinced the lens and hood wouldn’t be secure. He’d had a night shooting portfolio coming due, a concept which had lead up the tree to begin with and wasn’t working out, and generalized anxiety he was going to recognize in about five years but at the time had been treating with too much tobacco and blood.

“I’m sure you did, Nik, but I want us both to be sure you understand it,” Karin said. She’d been a few years out of the photography program ahead of him, and wore elegant traditional yoked sweaters in every heathered color while leaving her hair a tangled crown. She also had an adult job already, which was painfully cool even if Nicke knew his life up to that point had not prepared him to understand what her job actually was in the slightest. “We want to put a new face on the industry, and that comes down to everyone being comfortable, whether they’re human or not, even behind the camera. There’s just one shoot right now, but there’s an option to extend if we get another of our guys to come over from Russia in a couple weeks, and I’ll tell you I think everyone’s gonna like your style, so it’s good if these are terms you’ll be happy with.”

Nicke, frankly, had not thought that. One day shooting would be enough to go to the camera shop, though, and that was all he needed. “I get it,” he’d said. “I mean…it sounds fine, this much is good. I can help out, just…take some pictures, whatever.”

She’d leaned back to look at him, long and slow. Nicke had woven his fingers through his camera strap and wished, like he always wished, that he could be behind it.

“Alex will be excited to meet you,” was all she said, and took the signed contract.

 

  
She hadn’t been wrong.

Nicke, at twenty-one, had barely been anywhere but Valbo, which was not Sweden’s most happening place. It was a mostly vampire and human community, full of mixed families like Nicke’s; in primary school a kid from a werewolf family from Finland had moved in, and that had been a topic of polite discussion until she and her parents blended quietly in. Everyone donated blood to the foodbank, and when Nicke had thought about any sort of vampire art he mostly would have thought of primary school crafts class.

If there were somewhere you went to become someone who was comfortable discussing the latest trends in vampire erotica, it was probably Stockholm for art school. But by that point Nicke had already had an unavoidable air of being older than his friends because he talked much slower than he could think, and once you were the person people asked about disposable safety lancets to use with their new human girl- or boyfriend and you actually remembered where the red sharps-disposal bins were on campus, you just couldn’t admit you weren’t sure where to _start_  exploring porn. Nicke had known about leather and bondage and human-dom for werewolves and vampire films for humans, and of course he knew there were human pin-ups and softcore targeted to vampires too, but—

—knowing and wondering is nothing like watching Alex move.

At twenty-three Alex’s hair had still been seal dark, all of him falling in long, sleek lines. He hadn’t spoken any Swedish, but looked comfortable with Karin introducing Nicke and chatting a bit in English, while Nicke hunched behind her. He looked classically, statuesquely human, in the way Nicke supposed a glamour model would.

When he’d had to stick out a hand and Alex had caught it, his grip was square and strong. He’d tugged a bit, probably by overenthusiastic accident. When Nicke tugged back he came easily, just an inch, just for a moment letting Nicke move him.

It turned out Alex’s looks were the blessing of a long line of human glamour models. Karin had assured Nicke that he knew how to pose, which would make up for Nicke himself, but it was quickly clear his pride in his parents’ successful ’70s magazine careers lit up the studio much brighter than the shabby lighting rig.

“No, Mama never for vampires,” Alex explained while Nicke was plugging in cords and trying to sink into his usual studio confidence. He hadn’t quite managed to ask Alex anything, but that didn’t seem to matter. “Not cause—“ he squinted, then mimed ‘vampire-exclusionary politics’. He had an awfully expressive mouth. “Just not her look, so much.”

“So what did she do?” Nicke asked. He could feel himself leaning in, and Alex was matching him again.

“Werewolf—very mainstream. Lots like big, dominant, tell you what to do, even if they human. Not so much kink for wolves, you know?”

Nicke knew academically.

When Alex bounced off to change Nicke had flicked through the raws of his last shoot, and hated them. He only felt slightly kinder to whoever they’d been hiring when Alex was back, with little blue shorts and acres of gold skin, and he wouldn’t move properly.

Nicke was supposed to make him look beautiful, he’d gathered—or maybe that wasn’t the word that was usually used in erotica, but Alex undeniably was. And he was supposed to make him look wanting, welcoming, with his bared wrists and the soft shadows of his throat, make looking at his pictures feel like Nicke did when he hadn’t tasted blood in weeks.

Or, mostly Nicke felt nauseous when that happened, but that was more about the underlying stress, and that wasn’t the point. He did know what lust was supposed to feel like; he’d certainly imagined longing for someone before, though he’d always supposed he’d just been too sensible to let himself feel more than cautious interest for anyone he knew.

But every time Nicke caught an angle he liked Alex would already have moved on, convinced he needed to do something more, which wasn’t helpful because even if he obviously knew how to use his body he couldn’t see how everything came together on camera with the buzzy high-key light.

“Stay,” Nicke finally told him, holding up a hand. Alex went still, tipping his face up to Nicke and all his angles settling easily. It wasn’t much of a pose, but Nicke took half a dozen shots, testing something, and as the moment dragged out Alex had blinked at him, wanting to correct again. Nicke shushed him with a wiggle of his fingers, and then generously lowered one at a time while he made Alex wait.

Alex’s whole body breathed into waiting, when he was being made. Looking at those first thumbnails in his viewfinder, Nicke had seen the finished image, the shape of Alex’s willingness to play at being just a pleasant body unknown hundreds of people would see and think whatever they wanted about. You had to respect that generous, huge kind of comfort.

And those photographs were good as what they were. Nicke had taken the contract extension, and next time he’d brought every bit of lighting rig he could find lying around the flat he shared with a handful of other photography seniors in with him. Alex glowed in high-key, morning-after sunlight; in low-key his bones painted sweeping brushstrokes, or Classical human sculpture.

Nicke could feel the temptation towards black-and-white bubbling up, every photographer’s weakness, and stuffed another packet in his mouth. You had to earn something as obvious as monochrome, needed to justify it with pure technique, and Nicke had known he hadn’t been there yet. At the same time, he’d spent the weekend paging through old issues of the magazine Karin had let him take to mark up and while a few of the regular photographers were using soft, fluffy, bubbly high-key effectively for the pin-ups, it was just….

“Nicky, Nicky. They give homework? Or this just how you like it,” Alex said, pushing in to look at his notes. Nicke capped his red pen long enough to poke his cheek and hold his face back. “Nicky, no marks!”

“Don’t worry,” Nicke had said, waving the pen, once Alex’s jaw wasn’t actually pressed against his hair and the sensitive edge of his ear. “You’re still cute.”

Up this close, when Alex beamed he looked sunlit. Nicke was sure he was staring and if his friends were there they might have to nudge him to stop scowling, too, but when he was taking photos that was okay, so with Alex it would always be safe. He was right there, cold air and hot breath, windburn spilling down his throat and close stubble that turned metallic in the light. His skin really wasn’t fine or particularly pale like most of the other pin-up models; it would be easy to make him look too pink trying for soft colors.

“Hey, you getting—“ Alex said sympathetically, and then pretended to gnaw on his own wrist.

Nicke blinked. “I’m fine,” he said, “Please don’t,” but put a pin in the sight of Alex’s arm raised to his mouth, corded muscle and the inside of his wrist brushing his lip, probably the softest parts of him, heartbeat to heartbeat. He looked back at his pen, and made a couple distant notes. “I drink at home, you don’t…need to worry about that.”

“Okay,” Alex said, but took an odd breath, maybe hesitant.

“You can ask, though,” Nicke tacked on, hastily. “Always. Don’t mind, you can ask me stuff. Anything.”

“Okay,” Alex said, and that time he smiled with just his eyes.

“Karin?” Nicke called, when he went to change. “Can I get a couple more gold scrims?”

Alex, like some large predatory bird, loved the reflective gold foil. He looked to Nicke for permission before stealing a round scrim, playing with it for a minute like a frisbee and then a shield before holding it up behind him like the halo of an Orthodox icon, composing his face.

“I need that. For the light, to diffuse it, so it’s not directly on you and it’s colored more like sunlight,” Nicke said, but he took a couple easy pictures anyway, because Alex had known exactly what he was thinking. Deep color, oil paint and gilt on wood, not entirely dark or pretty but with room to find both in Alex’s hooded eyes and soft mouth.

Alex eyed him, waiting, then flicked the scrim down and back at Nicke. He was still going to try to do everything, Nicke knew, and he let him for a while before he held up a finger.

Again Alex’s whole focus had gone to his raised hand, sprawling comfortably, his face turned towards Nicke so the angle of his muscled shoulder would lead anyone’s eyes up the hollow of his throat. It would be perfect, if he didn’t insist on staring down the camera to get it. The amount of saturation Nicke was using made his eyes frankly eery when he did that.

“Alex,” Nicke said, warningly.

Alex rumbled.

“Alex, try to imagine. Like you’re home, with pretty vampire you like, whatever. Like you don’t know I’m watching,” Nicke said. And he had meant to say, ‘like I’m not here.’ But it seemed his fumble had struck some shivering chord with Alex, because he let his head fall back, eyelashes shadowing his cheeks, and then brought his arm to his mouth again, just the glimpse of teeth and the taut curl of his fingers to show he was biting down hard.


	2. 5 years in between

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been a knock-down drag-out fight between me and my demons, specifically the demons of 'deleting the app that contained your whole draft' and 'the Past Perfect tense.' The demon of Sasha Semin cameos has moved in, and sleeps on my couch. 
> 
> I turned what was going to be an introductory paragraph into 2,000 words in the past perfect last time and nobody called me on it, so now you get An Exercise in Tenses. 
> 
> A ‘danseur’ is a male ballet dancer.

Nicke payed off his camera. Alex payed the magazine’s overhead for the year.

Alex was an icon, the kind whose face would be painted with years of smoke. He hung in cheap frames behind bars across the Baltics, in quiet place of pride on the walls of cafes in Poland where people still met to talk about equal rights, through underground dancehalls in Slovakia and clubs like temples in Sofia down to cigarette stands in the Balkans. And Nicke took them all.

Alex’s hair got briefly worse; his costumes got better. He refused to tell anyone where they came from for a little while longer.

Alex would, in fact, work with anyone willing to point a camera at him for any derivative terrible shoot, and he would bring in money, but he seemed to know even before the totals came back that they would bring in the most Nicke’s Alex was on the cover.

“Please don’t tell Karin they should pay me more,” Nicke told him, at some point. “I have a contract.”

“Contract’s shit, Nicky,” Alex said wisely, pouring cola into his mouth.

“But still,” Nicke said.

“But okay,” Alex said, and slapped him on the shoulder, fingers curling before they slipped away, though there was only so far he could go. “You gonna be work more anyway.” He said that every year, and so far every year it was true.

Nicke shot models other than Sasha, for the magazine and scattered fashion houses, their calls coming more and more often now. Alex was as possessive and aggressive over Nicke’s client list as he was over his rights to all Nicke’s spare pockets, like Nicke really wanted to spill five different tinted lip glosses and clothespins and body adhesive spray and condoms every time he opened his equipment bag.

Nicke never needed to show him his schedule, and Alex never asked like a normal friend or Nicke’s own parents might; he simply knew it, because in one way or another Alex arranged most of the conversations that lead to connections on it. So Nicke was never allowed to run out of commissions, or to work with too many models Alex didn’t like. The portrait work he’d vaguely expected to do in university came occasionally, free to wait until he wanted it when he wasn’t under pressure to earn a living.

Nicke tipped his face into the sunshine warming the little plastic airplane window, enjoying how the clear light so high in the air caught in his eyelashes, and thought he might find a few portraits to take while they were in Prague.

They were flying down to answer a standing invitation for Alex to host a night at the Burlesque Royal and fit in a shoot while Alex’s favorite scene partner was available, and for once Alex was slouched beside Nicke in clothes that a normal person, or at least a Russian one, might wear on the plane. If Nicke turned his head the same sunlight would be slinking over Alex’s cheek, sinking down just under the neckline of his unusually unrevealing sweatshirt, finding frost in his hair. Nicke didn’t turn.

Alex wasn’t quite well-known enough he couldn’t go out in public, or at least any more than Nicke already thought he shouldn’t. When they landed he kissed the hand of the tired young packmother he’d been chatting with, waved to her cubs, thanked the human grandmother in the seat behind them for a book recommendation, and dragged Nicke off the plane by the wrist of his cardigan.

Nicke let him navigate the city, taking in the oil-slick flickers of pigeons and the rich green of shade trees, the taste of cigarettes and concrete and hot bread in the air while Alex followed his particular siren song.

They caught Sasha at the staff door of the dance studio he’d found, looking weary and green-ish and smelling like cold wide-open places far from anywhere, the way only he did.

Nicke was pretty sure Alex tried to lick his face at some point in the ambush. Maybe it was for the windswept taste, though Nicke still wasn’t sure if that was something a human like Alex knew he noticed. Sasha only tugged his duffel bag the rest of the way through the doors and dropped it on Alex’s foot.

Nicke laughed, dry after the long flight, and Sasha dimpled at him. “Kolya, hi,” he said, pulling Nicke down to kiss his cheek the way Nicke’s favorite models all liked to do.

He was still in practice leggings and a thin shirt, warm from the hour of barre work he must have snuck in, and Nicke caught Alex’s hot eyes, watching. Alex, who was only quiet about things he really wanted, had been not talking about the hosting gig since he told Nicke he was going to take it.

 

  
The magazine had sometimes hired vampire models for shoots, but was easier to sign humans and mostly-humans who could do the usual looks and sometimes pose together. None of them sold like the double act of Alex and Sasha. Nicke would think he had something to do with that, but it helped that Sasha could look just enough like a vampire to paint a picture beside Alex’s statuesque humanity, and yet they were both still inviting to the magazine readership.

It did not help that Sasha referred to this as ‘lesbian vampire porn’, but Sasha was not naturally inclined to be helpful.

“Lipstick vampire!” Sasha said, happily.

“No,” Nicke said, again. “Alex, please tell him he’s not.”

“I think that make sense okay. In Russian, kinda like a pun,” Alex said, twisting the cap back on bottle of artificial blood and straightening up. What he’d daubed on made everything smell strongly of bananas on top of Alex’s ivory soap and the wind and wild scent of Sasha.

The mystery of what, exactly, Sasha was besides human had never quite been answered. Most people glanced at his face and assumed he wouldn’t tell. Nicke, having listened to his idea of jokes for a few years now, was almost sure he didn’t know. Or maybe that was assuming too, and it was only that there wasn’t a word outside Russia for the creatures that had once run under the pines, fished lakes too deep to ever ice over, danced in the meadows that slowly grew cities. There hadn’t needed to be one, because they’d never left, and then Sasha had had to, first for ballet school and then the magazine’s Moscow studios with Alex when love and art didn’t pay their bills.

Other than the faintly leafy undertone to his tan, it wasn’t so notable on glossy paper, and supposedly that was all Nicke was thinking about when he was behind the camera. Maybe Nicke only still noticed because it reminded him that Alex, who Nicke only knew as an expatriate, had come from somewhere, too. Somewhere there was a house in a city that didn’t always smell like the Baltic Sea, a kitchen where his family gathered every day, and Alex could just as easily be there instead of with Nicke, lighting up Stockholm studios and refusing to learn the city rail system.

“Alex, wipe that off,” Nicke said. Alex went to wipe his hands on his pants. “No.” Alex crossed back to Sasha and Nicke said, “Not on Sasha either,” and Alex hooked an arm around him and tried to stick his fingers in his mouth.

“Could the two of you grow up and pretend you’re fucking like adults?” Nicke said. It was what they were angling for, and it made them laugh, even as Alex swore and shook the marks of Sasha’s needle-pointed teeth out of his palm. “What did you think he was gonna do?”

“No fair, Nicky,” Alex said, already sneaking a hand inside Sasha’s shirt to start tickling even as he held the wounded hand out for Nicke to fuss over.

Nicke glanced at it, but Sasha was the only person who liked the banana flavor, and had done a decent job cleaning the extra off. “Your professionalism is not hiding down Sasha’s pants,” he said instead.

Alex instinctively tried to leer and laugh at the same time, and ended up coughing, dislodging Sasha. Sasha rolled over him and onto the floor, tucking his whole head under Alex’s arm to smother wild giggles.

As far as Nicke knew he still didn’t know a word of Swedish, but he had had a kind of unshakeable faith Nicke was funny since the first day they met, and Nicke, rather helplessly, thought he was cute. Tomorrow night he’ll get Nicke kicked off the same train they took here by encouraging him to drunkenly rearrange all the adverts Nicke thinks are poorly composed, and Nicke will wish that made him less cute, but it never does, really.

“Tell him he has to keep his face in frame,” Nicke said, instead of bothering.

“You tell,” Alex said, staring into the camera the way he always tried to do and shifting his weight, slow, like Nicke just wouldn’t notice if he crushed Sasha.

Nicke stared back, but he said “Sasha, be good,” as steadily as he could in Russian.

The silent laughter shaking Alex stopped, and then Sasha heaved Alex up, then landed him solidly on his back again, Sasha on top of him. Alex’s hand flew up to his back, bracing and pulling him in.

“Stay still,” Nicky said. He had no idea how to add, ‘please,’ in Russian, since neither of them had ever said it.

Alex’s grip went tight, the tendons in his forearm shivering up as he dug into Sasha’s back. Then his hand swept up, seeking out the corner of Sasha’s jaw, the soft divot behind his ear, until Alex found the longest curls at the nape of his neck to tangle and shove Sasha’s face down into the hollow of his throat.

Nicke taps at his camera, focusing in on depth, light, and the rich gold color of them. “Good enough for pinup,” he says.

 

  
They dropped off their bags and watched night fall, and the streets shown in misty blue and gold until the snowballs opened. Nicke didn’t need to, but he knelt out of the way in the corner of the Royal, camera on his thigh while Alex burned on stage. He’d brought the new blue suit, which finally fit across the shoulders.   
  
The rough silk caught the stagelights when he stepped forward and the color pulled a few shadows with him, wrapping them close around his waist and down his long thighs.

In a few months he’ll lay that suit out, thumbs smoothing over the lapels and then the garment bag while Nicke watches without making a sound, and he’ll say he knows his professors will hate his final collection, but he won’t mean it, really. Next year he’ll get the airmail envelope with his formal degree, and he’ll call Nicke before he even finishes opening it.

When everyone else in the packed house was rapt under his eyes, Nicke was watching the lines of Alex’s back, the centimeters he seemed to grow as he stepped out on stage. If he glanced over he could have seen Sasha, curled loyally in a seat nearby, his bright eyes following Alex’s feet through the dark.

Five years ago Nicke wouldn’t have dared offer an opinion; now he can’t see how anyone couldn’t see the danseur in Alex even when he’s only speaking to the audience, a purpose in his movement, where he was and will be like light trails across a long exposure. After five years Nicke still doesn’t know what it feels like to dance ballet like they do, but he knows what their love for it feels like, caught hot between his hands until it feels like his, too.

Alex came right to Nicke when he was free, and Nicke tipped his camera up from his hip to capture the warm shape of him, because it made him laugh. Sasha sniggered and started telling Alex something that must have been about Nicke, because Alex laughed.

“You get any good ones, Nicky?” he said. Nicky settled the camera back carefully on his knee and tried to make a point of ignoring Sasha, more difficult when he couldn’t see him anyway around Alex’s side, because Nicke hadn’t taken any photos while Alex was onstage. They’d both been busy, silently wondering.

In a few hours Alex will step down from the stage for real, strip it all off, and say it was only okay, it’s only host, not like the real dancers he opened for. About half of that he’ll mean.

Alex, Nicke thinks, wants.

 

On the tram to their hotel Alex sat Sasha protectively between them, tugging so Alex could keep chattering at him and his back was pressed up against Nicke. It was, Nicke thought, eyeing Alex over Sasha’s tawny dandelion fluff of hair, a very Alex gesture of faith. Alex might be careless of his own space, but he wasn’t with other people. When it was thrown into relief by the strange cold scent and Alex’s hands, possessive over the shape of Sasha’s shoulder, Nicke could be struck all over again by how Alex acted as if trusting Nicke was the most natural thing in the world. If Nicke was safe behind his camera, somehow his presence, watching, was safe to Alex.

And that, Nicke thought—trying to keep a polite distance from any of either of their major arteries, while Sasha let Alex snuggle him into Nicke’s lap with profound unconcern—that, in five years or in fifty, that, Nicke would hold onto.

He walked through Prague, after, hours free for himself that he didn’t know what to do with, because he never quite thought about what he was supposed to be doing. That had all fallen into place after graduation, and there was telling Alex what to do, which always worked, but sometimes Mike called just to remind him he’d skipped the bit where he decided what to do with his life.

Tires sang over the cobblestones and he slipped past laughing, lovely strangers on the sidewalk, under people he doesn’t know cast in the orange glow of second-story apartment windows and the long sleepers far off in Olšany Cemetery, their mouths filled with earth when their bodies failed and their families laid them down.

Time wore vampires thin just like humans, in about the same span of time, but Nicke supposed while they lived they must seem invulnerable, vital, shaking off blows most humans couldn’t. And there were still always a few old vampires who seemed as if they must be dead before they sat up and decided they weren’t done yet, or whose bodies held together well enough over the centuries for ill-considered construction work or straying teenagers to wake them again. They usually woke cranky.

So you wanted to know they would rest, and when they were finally tired you kissed their cheeks and covered them with earth, keeping out the oxygen that might wake them into a body that barely held together any longer. You loved their memory like any other creature, and remembered loving them, however long passed.   
That secondhand old love weighed at Nicke’s fingers, flickered in color in the corner of his eyes wherever he looked, and maybe this, he thought. Maybe this was a good enough work to do with a life, just to try to capture this.

 


End file.
